


I'll Be Your Mirror

by duccello



Series: Gem Caste Uprising [2]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, F/F, Gem Caste Uprising, Gen, Homeworld - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Rebellion, pearl uprising, pearlmethyst - Freeform, pearls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 09:51:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5329736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duccello/pseuds/duccello
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The posting-in-tandem prequel to "Talkin' Dynamic Metamorphism Blues." When nine pearls who have been in earth's orbit since the gem war land on earth, Pearl and Amethyst are forced to open up about their pasts and their identities--and face the symmetries between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be Your Mirror

“Pearl, look what I found!” The screen door slams and Steven runs into the house at full tilt, making more noise than you’d think one little boy could without trying. Amethyst springs up from Steven’s bed on the upper level, startled out of a sound but biologically unnecessary sleep. He almost runs into Pearl, who’s been aggressively sweeping the stairs with a lot of muttering about human architecture having too many edges and nooks and crannies for sand to get into; and now she almost loses the broom over the ledge in surprise at his sudden entrance. She catches it with a flicker of motion and twirls it to her shoulder just in time so Steven won’t trip over it. Warrior’s reflexes honed over six millennia are a little less relevant in these moments, but still useful. Steven lifts his treasure on both hands, up over his head to her eye level. “Look!”

“A seashell?”

“It’s inside the seashell.”

Obliging, she turns the fragile faces of the shell open. “A rock?”

“A pearl!” Steven crows. “Like your name!”

“Oh!” She smiles at his excitement despite lingering confusion and crouches down to his level. “Right. I forget sometimes, that humans call these little things by gem names. I guess they look a bit like our gems, after all. It’s probably something they picked up when there were more of us on this planet.”

Steven takes the ‘rock’ out of the shell and holds it up to Pearl’s gem between his thumb and finger. It’s seed-like and misshapen, though it matches the much bigger, oblong pearl on her forehead perfectly in color and sheen. Then he drops it into the palm of her resting hand, still studying it intently. “It’s so tiny. And it’s the exact same color as your skin. When you hold it in your hand like that, you can barely see it.”

“Well,” Pearl says with a soft chuckle, “I think this little earth rock and I are made of a lot of the same stuff.”

He looks back up to her, eyes wide with intrigue. “Wow, what are the odds of that, huh?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised!” She drops the tiny pearl back into the shell, closing it carefully between her delicate fingers, and happily lets her voice slip into lecture tones. “Nature is full of patterns, Steven. The universe has beautiful order and symmetry—this shell spirals out in a predictable sequence of measurements, just like the spiral arms of this galaxy. Even if you were to travel to the farthest reaches of space, even though almost everything would be like nothing you’ve ever known, if you looked hard enough you’d probably be able to find something out there that looked a little bit like something from home. Do you understand?”

“I don’t know—”

“Stuff looks like other stuff,” Amethyst paraphrases, appearing from the top of the stairs and leaning her elbow on Pearl’s shoulder.

“Those shapes follow a geometric formula that’s repeated all over the universe! It’s vast and beautiful and amazing!”

“I’m not saying it’s not,” Amethyst replies with a shrug. “It doesn’t get any less beautiful and amazing when you cut to the chase and say stuff looks like other stuff.”

“Have you seen things like that on other planets? Before you came here, I mean?”

“Oh, of course! Remind me, I’ll have to show you sometime.”

“Well, what about now?”

“I—now is less than ideal. Can we come back to it?”

“I guess, but I’m really excited to see!”

“Well, I’m excited to show you, it’s only that it would be easiest to show you pictures—with my gem I mean—”

"Yeah, that’s what I was hoping you could do!”

“I mean, I can. Later. Not now. I’d rather not now.”

“Oh. Okay.” He pauses, starts to turn, then looks at her again. “Is something wrong?”

“Oh, no, nothing’s wrong, I’ve just—got a bit of a headache, actually. For some reason.”

"You’ve been thinking too hard again,” Amethyst says with a grin. “Face it, you’re never really gonna know whether a tree falling the forest when nobody’s around to hear it makes a sound or not.”

“What are you talking about? That’s easily answered; the mechanical waves produced by a falling tree will make noise whether or not anyone’s listening.”

“That’s not what the question’s about though.”

“What does that mean? It’s a question. It’s inquiring for specific information. It’s not ‘about’ anything.”

“No, it’s like this old thing some human came up with ages and ages ago about like, reality or whatever. Is it still happening if nobody actually experiences it? Where’re your mechanical waves gonna go if not into somebody’s head?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re still going to be there, it’s conservation of energy. What, is nature going to stop following the rules if it’s not supervised?”

Amethyst shakes her head and laughs. “Don’t worry about it. You’re no philosopher, huh.”

“I never aspired to be, so I don’t know why you’re so smug.”

“You guys are reeeeeeally running out of things to argue about,” Steven sighs over them.

“But think about it Steven, it’s so weird! What if when you’re not looking at me or hearing me or anything, I’m actually not there. You can’t prove I am.”

“Yeah I can,” he replies with a shrug. “Sometimes there’s chip crumbs in the couch cushion that I know aren’t from me, so I know you were there, even if I didn’t see you.”

“Yeah, but are those real? What if you dreamed them? What if every time you look away I just”—she spreads her hands and makes a suction-like sound effect—“out of all existence.”

“You’re right there!”

“Yeah, but we’re not talking about when I’m right here. We’re talking about, when I leave, do you know I still exist?”

“Can’t I just ask you?”

“What if I lie?”

“I trust you.”

Amethyst pauses, lips pressed tightly together, for a short but obtrusive amount of time. “Okay.”

While they’re talking, they almost don’t hear Pearl let out a soft groan of pain; but they do notice when it crescendos to a cry and her left hand allows the broom to fall as it flies to her gem. “Hey, are you o—” is all Steven can get out before her legs buckle and she sinks to the steps, her fall slowed and controlled only by Amethyst’s hasty grip.

Before they can even really panic Garnet fairly crashes into the room—having presumably seen this coming—and shouts “Quick, hold her head still!” She rushes over and sits down beside Pearl on the staircase. “Can you hear me?”

Pearl nods, her eyes narrow and welling. Her gem glows so bright it’s blinding, reflecting in Garnet’s visor like a tiny oblong sun.

“Don’t fight it. The tenser you are the worse the pain will be. Just let the message come through and get it over with.”

Although her expression is all business, she offers her hand, and Pearl grips it tight as her eyes roll upward and fall shut. With a violent twitch of her body she lets the beam of a hologram unfold.

Someone is speaking in front of a screen, but the image is so jumpy and full of static that only a vague silhouette is really visible. The sound is, similarly, noisy static.

“What’s happening?” Steven asks, his voice breaking with worry. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’ll be alright, Steven. Pearl’s gem is meant to be able to act as a transmission receiver, but…it’s made a little off, that’s all. The signals don’t come through the way they should. It makes her head hurt pretty badly.”

“Why did nobody ever tell me she can do this?” Amethyst wonders out loud.

“Because she kinda…can’t,” Garnet answers, gesturing at the unintelligible projected message. Every so often, a word or two gets by the static—“occupied,” “system,” “Rose Quartz”—but it’s never enough to provide any information.

Steven climbs around all of them to sit down on Pearl’s other side. “Hang in there,” he says, smiling desperately and hugging her rigid, passive frame. “You’re doing great!”

A few more seconds pass and the beam blinks off, as abruptly as it came on. Pearl relaxes suddenly with a gasp, as if she’s been holding her breath, and when she lifts her head her eyes open unevenly, like their lids are very heavy. “You okay?”

Pearl presses her arm to the wall just above her and pulls herself up incrementally, moving her hand like a mountain-climbing foothold. “Yeah, I’m fine, I’m good. I am…dandy.” She looks up again, slowly, squints into the room and shakily calls out, “Rose?”

“Honey.” It’s an unusually coddling word, for Garnet, although it’s still spoken in a completely flat voice. It only takes one word to say everything she needs to say.

Pearl smacks the wall, semi-falls back into a sitting position and mutters something in a language much older than humanity. Steven assumes she doesn’t want him to know what she said. Amethyst assumes she doesn’t want him to know what she said because she was cursing, and cracks a grin despite the sudden gravity. Garnet knows that what she actually said was something like “On top of everything, it’s damned inconvenient,” so in a way, they’re all correct.

"Anyway," Pearl breathes, "What was--" She trails off into a vague hand motion.

“It was Yellow Diamond,” Garnet says softly.

As if to make up for the softness, Amethyst responds by half-roaring, “Wait, WHAT?” Her hands dig into her hair. “Why would she call us? I thought you said Peridot wasn’t gonna traitor us! Who else knows we’re here?”

“I don’t know,” Garnet responds, no less evenly.

“Wait,” Pearl says in between gasps of breath. “What’d she look like?”

“Straight bangs, pointy chin, gown…cape…type thing,” Amethyst responds.

“Epaulettes?”

“What?”

“Like—tassels—on the shoulders.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Pre-war regeneration,” she says, her words released in a laboring sigh. “It’s an—old transmission.”

“Really?!” Amethyst pulls her fingers out of her hair and points them skyward. “Alright! Let’s hear it for not having to deal with that!”

“Someone still beamed that message here, and the fact that they didn’t try to send it through the wailing stone means it’s someone who either doesn’t know us or doesn’t like us. And let’s face it, if it’s gems from homeworld, it’s probably that second one,” Garnet says slowly, her face as unreadable as ever.

"Do you know what we need to do?"

Garnet responds to Pearl's question by putting her hand on top of Pearl's head purposelessly, as if it just belongs there. “ _You_ should rest for a minute. That did a number on your head.”

“No, no, I’m fine. I’ve got five more steps to sweep.” She stands up on shaky legs, a hand each on Amethyst and Steven’s shoulders, and eyes the broom, which has fallen off to the side of the steps and out of her immediate reach.

Garnet steps down and grabs it before Pearl can do anything. “I’ll do it. Go sit down.”

Pearl lets out a little huff of frustration. Small points of her skin and clothes blink and discolor, like signal disruptions on a TV screen. Steven and Amethyst, in sync like they’ve discussed it, grab hold of her arms and help her over to the couch, providing more support than she’d probably care to admit. Once she’s settled Steven sits down beside her, hesitates a long time, and then climbs into her lap and rests his head on her shoulder.

She smiles, invoking stock phrases: “Aren’t you a little big for this?”

Steven seriously considers it, and then says, “Nah, I’m good here.”

Pearl wraps her arms around him. It wouldn’t be very honest to pretend she doesn’t understand the importance of being occasionally clingy. “Suit yourself.” They stay like that for a few quiet moments before he says, “You didn’t tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“That that could happen. That using one of your powers could hurt you like that. You usually tell me everything about gem stuff. Like…more than I’m ever gonna need to know. This seems like kind of a big thing to leave out.”

“It’s not something that ever affects the majority of gems,” she says, lips tightening. “Just me. You don’t need to worry about it.”

Ordinarily, that’s enough to get Steven to drop something, but this time of all times he presses the issue. “Look, I know you’re saying that because it’s really none of my business, and that’s okay, but—I have my mom’s healing powers, so if something hurts one of you guys…it kind of is my business, right?”

"I appreciate the thought, Steven," she sighs, trying to look reassuring through the traces of strain still in her face. "But these things happen, and I've dealt with them for a long time. I know how to take care of it. It's nothing, I promise. Really nothing."

Steven looks, to say the least, unconvinced. “What does it feel like? Why does it hurt?”

She thinks for a moment, leans around him and picks up his ukulele from the table. “Put your hand right here,” she says, guiding him by the wrist to a spot just below the soundhole. Holding the instrument steady in her other hand, she gives it a strum. Steven laughs and pulls his fingers away. “Tickles, right? It’s the sound waves going through—mechanical waves again, no amount of THEORIZING MAKES THEM GO AWAY, AMETHYST—" (she projects this over her shoulder in the kitchen, where Amethyst sits on the counter sipping what looks like a mugful of hoisin sauce), "but anyway, they make the wood vibrate and then you can feel it. Obviously this doesn’t hurt, but a more intense vibration could register as pain. The signals are electromagnetic waves. Other gems who are—made for it--most of them don’t feel the waves. Just receive them and play the message no problem.”

“There isn’t any way to fix it?”

She smiles. “Your mother did everything she could. She made it a lot better. It used to hurt at least a little almost all the time, and now it hardly ever does. But if something’s got a fundamental design flaw, you can only fix it so much.”

Pearl keeps smiling, but it’s obvious that that’s because she doesn’t know what else to do. Steven just looks at her.

“Wait!” Garnet says from behind them. “I see it!”

“See what?”

“Who sent the message!”

“Really? Who is it, who was it?!” Pearl springs to her feet and immediately topples forward into Garnet’s arms.

“I said to sit down. It’s an old gem ship that’s been in near-earth orbit for about five thousand years. When the rebellion broke out everybody bailed except—the stewardship crew.”

“Oh my goodness,” Pearl breathes. Her eyes are still wide and glassy and her legs still shaky from the signal’s impact, and it makes her look even more unsettled than she is as she grips Garnet’s arm with one hand and raises the other to her mouth. “They didn’t send the message that way because they wanted to threaten us. They sent it because it was the only way they could.”

“Who?” Steven asks. “They’re gems?”

“They’re pearls,” Pearl replies, softly. “A nacreous-culture commission group. My sisters.”


End file.
